From STEM activities to kickboxing and a field trip to Chevron, 26 girls are participating in this year’s edition of Wonder Girls Camp.
Organized by the Crisis Center of West Texas, the camp runs for a week at Crossroads Fellowship.
80/20 was brought in again this year for the camp and the theme was Outer Space.
Culligan offered a water demonstration and there was a career day where different professionals shared things about their careers. The last day of camp was a field trip to Chevron. Kickboxing and dance were also offered.
Culligan donated all the water for the weeklong camp that ends June 28 and were going to explain the chemistry of water, for example, said Prevention Education Director Alejandra Ramirez.
The first day, campers were shy, but by Wednesday she’d noticed a big difference.
”They’ve got more energy. They’re excited,” Ramirez said.
This is the eighth edition of the camp and the first year the theme has been outer space. Ramirez said it takes more than six months to plan. For volunteers, they get older high school students who might need community service hours, but they also have a couple of nurses from Medical Center Hospital that are giving of their time and in the past they have had Ector County ISD teachers.
“80/20, the group that we bring to do the STEM activities, they have been doing like rockets with them, drones, so I feel like a lot of the activities have also incorporated with the new theme,” Ramirez said.
Gigi Balerio, a 13-year-old seventh-grader at St. Mary’s Central Catholic School, and Jade Raigoza, an eighth-grader at Bonham Middle School, are both returning campers. This is Balerio’s third and last year and Raigoza’s second.
Balerio said she likes that they get to learn new things every year like robots, making ice cream and making a watermelon explode with rubber bands. She’s also looking forward to the field trip to Chevron on the last day of camp.
Raigoza said learning robotics and the other fun activities they do keeps her coming back.
They both said what they learn at camp is useful when they go back to school.
“I did learn how to do coding and also how to work robotics and fix puzzles and solve them while doing it,” Balerio said.
Raigoza said learning robotics at camp helped her when she was in robotics at school because she already knew how to code some of the stuff.
Balerio said she had noticed the change in theme of the camp this year.
“There’s a lot of new kids that I noticed, not the same old ones have come back just the new ones. And I noticed that they were very excited about it and wanted to learn more about it,” she added.
